I'm not a political scientist, so I apologize if this sounds naive:
Doesn't the sheer size of the US inhibit the political process? That there's far too many issues, far too much at stake, to place into the hands of otherwise ignorant and apathetic laypeople? Wouldn't it be better if there were a tiered political process, say with the masses voting for their local governments only, and then the heads of those local governments being the only voters that can vote for representatives to state governments, and then the representatives of the States are the only voters that can vote people into national representatives overseeing the entire nation?
The benefits would be that it'd be downright impossible for idiots like Trump to come out of nowhere and skyrocket into a position of power; those positions of power would only be available to career politicians that had started at the bottom and worked their way up. Moreover, because each election is a small and disconnected process, the voting is impossible to fudge because there's just too few people in any single one. Also, that for people running, their constituency makes logical sense, who they have to appeal to for votes actually understand the issues, and the because the voter base is smaller, they wouldn't have to be in anyone's pocket for campaigning money, reducing the likelihood of corruption. It also allows the common man to focus on what's really important to them: those issues in their own community that they can actually understand and see the results from, rather than having to be educated on all issues that effect the entire world, which is unreasonable from the start. Fads and waves of popularity for causes or people would be greatly minimized, since they'd have to pass through the laborious trials of going through each tier of the democracy in order to get instituted at all, and fads never last long enough for that; so those people at the top can finally concern themselves with the greater issues of governing rather than be constantly pandering to the masses.
I don't know how parties would fit into all this, but I imagine those would be minimized as well, since the constituency of any given tier would be increasingly small and specialized, able to decide based on the facts rather than on popularity or party lines. I'm probably wrong on this one though, politicians just ruin everything.
The largest downside I can imagine would be that since the process is so much larger and slower, the masses lose a bit of that "consent of the governed" that makes government the smallest necessary evil it is; meaning that if the topmost administration is hated by the people, they can only vote for representatives that reflect that hatred at the local level, who then have to carry that to the next level, and so on, until a change in the topmost administration is made.
So, basically, our current democracy, but chopped up into lot of smaller democracies in a tiered pyramid structure. This is to accommodate the US's massive size and vast differences; and to allow governing to be rational without the drama and circus of massive elections every four years; and to allow elections to be themselves more rational and incorruptible. It's just an idea I've been stewing on for awhile, but I'm obviously one of those 'laypeople that aren't educated on the grander and subtler affairs of government'.